As Fred Hoyle long
ago pointed out; the Sun does not conform to the
expected behavior of an internally heated ball of gas,
simply radiating its energy into space. Instead, its
behavior at every level is complex and baffling. Nowhere
is it more mysterious than in a sunspot.

Sunspots are
strange blemishes on the face of the Sun that offer some
of the strongest evidence against the Sun being powered
internally. They are conventionally described as being a
result of strong magnetic fields pinching off the
convection of heat from inside the Sun before it can
reach the surface.

The electric star
interpretation is that sunspots are breaks in the hot
surface of the sun, through which we can get a glimpse
of the underlying layers. To satisfy the standard
theory, these deeper layers of the Sun should be hotter
to drive the so-called vigorous convection. But they
aren't. The dark center of the sunspot, or umbra, is 20%
cooler than the rest of the surface of the Sun.

The outer shadow
of the sunspot, or penumbra, and the structure and
behavior of the filaments that form the penumbra are
also too complex to be explained by standard stellar
theory.

There is a
temptation for plasma researchers to simply equate the
penumbral filaments with gargantuan lightning bolts, but
the features do not match all that well. A typical
lightning flash lasts for 0.2 seconds and covers a
distance of about 10 km. The penumbral filaments last
for at least one hour and are of the order of 1000 km
long. If we could scale a lightning bolt 100 times we
might have a flash that lasted between 20 and 200
seconds and was 1000 km long. The lifetime is too short.
Also, measurements of scars on lightning conductors show
that the lightning channel is only about 5 mm wide.
Scaling that by 100 times would have solar lightning
channels far below the limit of telescopic resolution

However, there is
another familiar form of atmospheric electric discharge
that does scale appropriately and could explain the
mysterious dark cores of penumbral filaments. It is the
tornado! Tornadoes last for minutes and can have a
diameter of the order of one kilometer. Scale those
figures up 100 times and we match penumbral filaments
very well. And if the circulating cylinder of plasma is
radiating heat and light, as we see on the Sun, then the
solar "tornado" will appear, side on, to have bright
edges and a dark core (right image, above).